Are we freaks? Are they freaks?

I look out at a world with which I have nothing in common. I think these people have no clarity to their thinking; even more, I think they're caught up in a quest for social power by replacing their thinking with memorized knowledge about what other people like (trends, memes, "morality"). Socialization has replaced the ability to reason, and "reason" as we like to call it has become deconstruction, or a breaking down to the simplest element and assuming it's an independent variable; even worse, we often create mental figures that are logical according to our thinking, but have no antecedent in reality, but we claim these are somehow more real than reality itself.

Then I look at a list of great thinkers, starting with Friedrich Nietzsche but extending to Aldous Huxley, Tom Wolfe, Julius Evola, Ferdinand Celine, Michel Houellebecq, even Siddhartha, who saw the same thing.

Then I think further... uncountable planets, let's just say that one in every million has life. That means a lot of competition. Which species thrive? Those that break out of this path. The others die out like any irrelevant thing.

So we live in this species which goes through cycles of denial->death, and yet we strive onward, because (speaking for myself) we believe in life. We think the experience of consciousness is not just good, but amazing, must-see TV (heh). We think it should always exist and be enhanced, pushed further in a quest to make it better. In the worlds of Houellebecq, we believe that life can be pure unadulterated joy, and we trust the universe to do something good -- though not necessarily clear to us -- when we kick the bucket and turn into worm food.

In the meantime, we are in the grips of a moral or even theological struggle. Most people are hellbent for denial. They start with the premise of equality, which allows them to justify their insane opinions, and then quickly invent whatever sequence of words they need to in order to hide their desire to hide from reality in all forms. We're all equal! We all deserve equal treatment, equal resources! We should be able to do whatever we want!

And the grand lie:

"What I do doesn't affect you!"

They say that as society, its pants around its knees and a needle in its hand, looks up from its grey rubble flesh in the ghetto of filth and mental disrepair, and says collectively, "What, me worry?"

They have ruined society through this fundamental deconstruction, separating cause and effect and individual from world. They will ruin anything they touch. They invent pleasant fictions about how large corporations, Kings, governments, Hitlers or even Satans are the things oppressing us, but really, it's our own bad judgment and monkey impulses that enslave us. We cannot control our desires. We are easily fooled by misleading or ambiguous symbols. And worst of all, we frequently cannot escape our own mental tokens and process in order to notice the world, a process called solipsism.

Either we are freaks, or they are freaks; actually, both are true. We are freaks, or exceptions, in a time when 90% of humanity have found a billion ways to think the same thing, which is that their desires matter more than reality and that morality is a means of manipulating others to get these desires accomplished -- they ignore the secondary consequences, of course; they got what they wanted. But that means that they are freaks according to nature, a species that avoids reality and hides inside its own head, all while congratulating itself on its intellect.

It's the hydra: uncountable heads, a single root concept, which is that our mental impressions -- which are easily forged by our social impressions, since those too use feelings and words and images -- can be projected onto reality, because they are morally more important than the consequences of our acts.

I am happy being a freak because I do not participate in the death-cycle. It is fundamentally against my wiring to do so; I love life, and I love consciousness, and the death-cycle keeps both in a zombie state of "thinking" (the same seven basic desires) and "living" (in a world of not only limited options, but zero appreciation for truth, beauty and clarity). The neurotic human monkey runs onward, on a perpetual quest for the latest and greatest or the newest and most important, but life alone is eternal.

They are the freaks, although we are in this age freaks, and we do well to remember that.

...we live in this species which goes through cycles of denial->death... I do not participate in the death-cycle. It is fundamentally against my wiring to do so; I love life, and I love consciousness, and the death-cycle keeps both in a zombie state of "thinking" (the same seven basic desires) and "living" (in a world of not only limited options, but zero appreciation for truth, beauty and clarity).

Sir,

Could you expand on this 'death cycle'? Do you mean, like, denial->civilization collapse=death?

Also-> "they are freaks according to nature, a species that avoids reality and hides inside its own head, all while congratulating itself on its intellect." Do most species NOT avoid reality?

The general populace of any era has never been a reasoning bunch. I don't think either side of the coin are necessarily "freaks"; there have been and always will be people like you, Conservationist, who see straight through the facade of whatever social memes are present while most of the general population is hobbling around accomplishing not much of anything, being pushed around (or, in our case, inundated) by their superiors in one way or another.

Thinking that modern society is so much different than any other time in human history as far as what's happening socially goes is a farce. The biggest difference is that we're much more destructive now than ever, but that won't go unpunished.

...we live in this species which goes through cycles of denial->death... I do not participate in the death-cycle. It is fundamentally against my wiring to do so; I love life, and I love consciousness, and the death-cycle keeps both in a zombie state of "thinking" (the same seven basic desires) and "living" (in a world of not only limited options, but zero appreciation for truth, beauty and clarity).

Sir,

Could you expand on this 'death cycle'? Do you mean, like, denial->civilization collapse=death?

Also-> "they are freaks according to nature, a species that avoids reality and hides inside its own head, all while congratulating itself on its intellect." Do most species NOT avoid reality?

Well, think about ants, bees, or termites. They have no unnecessary discussions or ego drama, they just do what is necessary for the flourishing of the group(this is not an endorsement of collectivism for human beings, however).

And then there’s what happened in Sierra Leone after the amputations brought the peace, which brought the U.N., which brought the money, which brought the N.G.O.s. All of them, as Polman tells it, wanted a piece of the amputee action. It got to the point where the armless and legless had piles of extra prosthetics in their huts and still went around with their stubs exposed to satisfy the demands of press and N.G.O. photographers, who brought yet more money and more aid. In the obscene circus of self-regarding charity that Polman sketches, vacationing American doctors turned up, sponsored by their churches, and performed life-threatening (sometimes life-taking) operations without proper aftercare, while other Americans persuaded amputee parents to give up amputee children for adoption in a manner that seemed to combine aspects of bribery and kidnapping. Officers of the new Sierra Leone government had only to put out a hand to catch some of the cascading aid money.

The general populace of any era has never been a reasoning bunch. I don't think either side of the coin are necessarily "freaks"; there have been and always will be people like you, Conservationist, who see straight through the facade of whatever social memes are present while most of the general population is hobbling around accomplishing not much of anything, being pushed around (or, in our case, inundated) by their superiors in one way or another.

Thinking that modern society is so much different than any other time in human history as far as what's happening socially goes is a farce. The biggest difference is that we're much more destructive now than ever, but that won't go unpunished.

There's truth to that, but that's perhaps as well an oversimplification. The intensity and omnipresence of stimuli that exist in this day and age to reduce everything to abstraction is unparalleled for one. I don't think you can argue the sense of unreality present in life today has ever been mirrored in history so far. What other age could have birth post-modernism and absurdism? And while the general populace has been to varying degrees always where it is, in other ages they were less in number, and were given a particular place within a hierarchy that made sure their strengths were used, and their weaknesses minimized. This is not the case in this day and age. Our civilization, unlike others before it, has no direction save gratification of short term pleasure and desires (a consequence of being ruled by the stomach of society, so to speak). Purely materialistic, in all senses of the word.

Modernity has afforded undermen economic and social empowerment and paths to leadership that were formerly unavailable. This is the critical difference. The undermen remain genetic undermen despite social reclassifications.

I look out at a world with which I have nothing in common. I think these people have no clarity to their thinking; even more, I think they're caught up in a quest for social power by replacing their thinking with memorized knowledge about what other people like (trends, memes, "morality"). Socialization has replaced the ability to reason, and "reason" as we like to call it has become deconstruction, or a breaking down to the simplest element and assuming it's an independent variable; even worse, we often create mental figures that are logical according to our thinking, but have no antecedent in reality, but we claim these are somehow more real than reality itself.

The bolded part is probably the most lucid, accurate description of that problem I've ever read. I don't want to be Mr. Pat You On the Back, but honestly, that sentence deserves it.

If you want a fully empirical and scientific account of this 'US vs THEM' idea that underlies the ANUS view of nihilsits vs the herd then one can found emerging in psychology of frued and jung in the early 1900's and continuing on into modern cognitive science under the terms 'type 2' and 'type 1' cognition and encapsulated under the literature on 'dual-pocessing theory'.

THE DICHOTOMY:

Feud: unconsious (personal) vs egoJung: unconscious (collective) vs egoModern Cognitive Science: a host of autonomous, unreflective, intuitive, parallel cognitive 'systems' (type 1) including modularity (intuitive responses programmed by evolution which automatically respond to a limited class of environmental inputs in predetermined way, such as our intuitive theory of mind, agency detection, sexual response, social exchange ideas, and many more), emotion, conditioned reponses (see bahaviourism and Skinner) vs reflective, analytic, sequence-based (type 2) processing which is primarily language based, and which can be augmented by 'mindware' coming from culture (eg the software of logic and other facilitators of clear thinking the functions of which is to directly reduce the all-too-human biases of type 1, intuitive, processing). Memes are examples of mindware and reflect the reality that type 2 processing is not at all immune from the pull of type 2 cognition. Certain memes (i.e. that my mouse only moves when i touch it, that god exists, etc) enjoy a cultural selection advantage over others due to their 'fit' with a larger amount of type 1 systems.

Thinking that modern society is so much different than any other time in human history as far as what's happening socially goes is a farce. The biggest difference is that we're much more destructive now than ever, but that won't go unpunished.

This sort of consideration needs to be more predominant in ANUS's considerations.

Could you expand on this 'death cycle'? Do you mean, like, denial->civilization collapse=death?

Also-> "they are freaks according to nature, a species that avoids reality and hides inside its own head, all while congratulating itself on its intellect." Do most species NOT avoid reality?

The death cycle is most fully explained in Plato's Republic, Chapter 8, as explicated by a competent modern source but your instincts were correct: civilizations form, people start getting used to convincing other people to do stuff instead of making a case for its actual necessity, and then the civilization gets delusional and dies like a withered dong in the breeze.

I think most species do not avoid reality. They live in it, without the additional layer of language/abstraction to help them bullshit their way out of it.